Paper Short Abstract:

Written and audio documents are the two main sources for studying the history of folk music. What are the possible uses of modern technologies to combine these two kinds of documents? Can they provide us with new insights into old questions about folk music?

Paper Abstract:

Archives of folk music consist, on the one hand of collections of written and printed sources, and on the other of audio recordings preserved on various media from wax cylinders to modern digital formats. Each of these two groups provides users with different information, leading to varying understandings of folk music and how it can be studied.

The archive of the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences contains written documents that go back to the beginning of the 19th century and audio recordings as old as 1909. In some cases, these documents were created during coordinated research projects, in other cases by individual collectors. During the last decades, they have been gradually digitized to preserve them and make them available.

Modern information technologies make it possible to create all kinds of connections between documents. The issue, however, is to critically assess what information can be extracted from these sources and what meaningful connections can be made between them.

The presentation will try to outline new directions currently being sought at our archive and how modern methods of data analysis applied to both written and audio documents can help us find new perspectives on issues such as authenticity, performance style, or the relation between music and lyrics.